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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29173521">beneath the surface</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/celtytheselkie/pseuds/celtytheselkie'>celtytheselkie</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Mutual Pining, Near Death Experiences, Pre-Relationship, Recreational Drug Use, Slow Burn, because thats what this is going to be lmao, hello fellow kids are you ready for Yearning</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 12:13:53</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>17,117</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29173521</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/celtytheselkie/pseuds/celtytheselkie</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>When a simple mission goes awry, Hancock is forced to confront his latent feelings towards Nora.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>John Hancock/Female Sole Survivor</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>62</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter I</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>hello everyone, welcome to this trainwreck. </p><p>i have a bad habit of editing continuously - plot points will remain intact, of course, but if you reread this and things have a little more Zest than before, then that is why. </p><p>please enjoy!!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>How Nora manages to convince him into shit like this will always be beyond him. Sure, he might have a bit of a soft spot for the woman - he’s got a type of woman he likes to keep around and that type is Women That Could Kill Him - and she could talk people far less generous than him into far worse, but this is testing him. He is always ready and willing to kick some serious ass at Nora’s side, of course, but the Kendall Hospital is a cesspool rotted out with corpses of Railroad agents, destroyed synths, and was crawling with raiders that were more drugged up than he was and were all armed to the fucking teeth.</p><p>The mission will be straight forward, she had said.</p><p>In and out, she had said.</p><p>Just getting a status update, she had said.</p><p>“Status update, <em> my ass</em>!” Hancock growls, hunched behind the cover of a wall as he reloads his shotgun as fast as he possibly can.</p><p>Nora’s scoff is drowned out as the raiders lay cover fire through the open door that divides them, and she shouts over the sound of gunfire as she sits back on her haunches, coiled tight like a spring as she waits for an opportunity, “Okay, I’m <em> sorry </em>! Is <em> that </em> what you want to hear? Will that make you feel better?”</p><p>There’s no chance for any sharp wit or retort - and you best believe, he has plenty hidden under the sash - as he watches a frag fly in a high arc towards them. A countdown starts in his mind, adrenaline supercharging the jet racing through his system and dragging time to a crawl, the frag grenade hitting the ground and skittering across the tile. Nora is sane, Hancock is not - she dives through a doorway and out of the way of the literal ticking time bomb between them, while Hancock dives <em> towards </em> it, scooping it up in his hand before it loses it’s momentum and tossing it back at the raiders that threw it. Cries of alarm ring out as their weapon comes flying back at them, the raiders scattering like radroaches. It doesn’t quite get as far as Hancock was hoping, the grenade exploding and raining a lethal shower of shrapnel down on the raiders that weren’t fast enough, and Hancock grins as he watches them descend into chaos. </p><p>Hancock crows in victory, vibrating from actually managing the maneuver without blowing his hand off, turning as Nora checks around the corner, “Did you fucking <em> see </em> that, sister! Damn, I am-”</p><p>Nora sees something beyond him, eyes blowing comically large in horror that dumps a bucket of cold water over his enthusiasm, “<b><em>HANCOCK</em></b>!” </p><p>It’s a blur, even with the jet slowing down time to a speed that should let him get a play by play - Nora lurches forward, gloved hands taking him by the lapels of his coat and pulling him so hard he is yanked right off his feet and thrown across the floor towards the the open doorway that she had just hidden behind. She doesn’t quite manage to throw him that far, but he lands impressively close, and they both scramble into the corner of the wall as Nora throws herself down on top of him, roughly crushing his head against her.</p><p>Which… What the fuck?</p><p>There’s a beat where he sits there like a gaping idiot, wondering if it’s the jet that slowed time or if it’s just that he’s crushed between the corner and Nora, Nora on top of him, holding him, wrapped around him, the heat of her brow tucked against his throat, and his heart lurches, pounding so fast, but maybe that’s just the drugs, maybe it’s just the thrill of the fighting, but she’s close and she smells of gunpowder and stimpaks and somehow that combination on her is a drug he's desperate to taste, and he-</p><p>A missile whistles through the doorway and detonates against the narrow hallway’s far wall, obliterating the space where Hancock had been standing seconds before. Rubble showers the room, and Hancock acts without thought, hooking Nora’s leg around his waist and flipping them so that his back faces the brunt of the inferno. Burning rubble explodes outward, and he buries in close to Nora in the corner to become as small as he can, hissing as rubble burns through his coat and sears his skin. It hurts like a motherfucker for a second, but ah well. Not like another scar will hurt.</p><p>Nora coughs through the dust, shaking the messy strands of now dusty, jet black hair out of her eyes that has come loose from her tightly braided bun. She is completely unfazed by the physically proximity that has completely paralyzed Hancock, her expression only furious as she stares past his dazed look and out the open door,  “A fucking missile launcher? Fucking <em> really?” </em>She bites out, yelling more to herself than anyone, and her fury startles a laugh from him. </p><p>He wishes he had something clever to say, but she is crushed to him, not even the smallest margin of space between them, his hand holding her leg over his hip as if they were in the midst of something vastly different than an active combat situation, and the degree he wishes it wasn’t an ongoing firefight shocks him. Her eyes, smoldering dark brown - fuck, had there always been flecks of green? - wait, what the fuck kind of thought was that - burning in the light of the fire that flickers behind him. Those eyes turn to him, and he is frozen in place by their intensity, and when her hand circles around the back of his collar in a gesture of comfortable familiarity, he feels it so acutely that it’s almost an electric shock had forces his air from his lungs in a shuddering gasp.</p><p>And it isn’t like it was a shock for her to touch him - for a woman as that tended to keep to herself whenever possible, she was generous with casual physical contact. Nora’s a show-stopping liar; if Hancock had a silver tongue, her's is pure gold, but when nothing was on the line, she’s terrible with words that actually meant something to her, and in the rare moments that she tried, she struggled so much to express herself that she would simply gave up before he could know what cogs were turning in her head. Touch seemed to give her an outlet to express her favour and feelings without struggle, and so whenever she spoke with those that she cared for the most, it was with her hand on them in some capacity.</p><p>It was odd to get used to for most at first - wastelanders were not a people that were particularly touchy-feely, and were definitely not a population of huggers. In the early days, Hancock gave Valentine unending hell for how out of sorts it used to leave the unflappable detective when she would rest a hand on the synth’s arm whenever the detective spoke to her, which was only worsened when she was unbothered if her hand happened to rest on his damaged arm, human finger tips against a skeleton of pure steel. Not that Valentine knows, nor would he ever know, but Hancock had been left just as surprised as Nick when she had done the same to him when they had begun to travel together. Her fingers reaching out for his, her hand on his arm, even looping their arms together at the elbow like they were a respectable duo instead of two gun-toting maniacs with a death wish. She'd touched his scar roughened skin without flinching, without comment, and without ceremony when most smoothskins outside of Goodneighbor didn’t even like to share air with him, much less <em> touch </em> him. She touched him like she did Nick, like she did Piper - frequently, affectionately, and without hesitation.</p><p>He has long since grown used to it after all these months, but being trapped together in what may as well be a lover’s embrace, he feels enraptured by the feel of her gloved hand at the back of his neck. His skin feels too hot and too tight, and the feeling of warmth burning in his chest is only worsened by the intense way she carefully searches his face for pain, “Are you okay?”</p><p>He doesn’t have an answer for that. His back is burned and already itches maddeningly, telling him that his ruined skin is pulling back together to add another burn to the tapestry. He looks back to where he had been standing, the unmistakable but confusing thrill of Nora’s touch being replaced with… something, something dark and deep that makes his stomach bottom out, how close that call came settling in his gut like a physical weight. Like a domino effect, the floor groans, low and long, at the weight of the wall that has crumbled atop it, and then a huge chunk of the floor - maybe directly where he was - collapses in a fall Hancock knows would’ve broken a leg at best, maybe even killed him on impact, and that was only if he’d been lucky enough to not be blown into a million pieces first. </p><p>“Holy <em>shit</em>,” He whispers as he takes in the carnage, and realizes that for all his ghoulish ‘superpowers’, as Nora would sometimes sarcastically call them, this would’ve destroyed him completely and utterly. The bottomed out feeling fades when he realizes that Nora had just literally saved his skin. Not for the first time, certainly not for the last, but in this moment it strikes him in a way that leaves him unable to say something clever to dispel his racing heart. </p><p>“Thank me later,” She quips as she claps him on the arm, an unspoken order to stand, and he does so in a graceless scramble, the burns making known their protests as he gets to his feet. He holds out his hand to her, and she takes it without hesitation, grasping his wrist as he helps her to her feet. She saunters back to the edge of their smoldering cover, and Hancock is watching way too close, and he’d never felt bad about <em> that </em>before because it was him and it was a joke, kind of, and she knows that, and because he knew - knows - that Nora would never bite so he didn’t dare to hope, and now it’s decidedly not funny for him. He doesn’t have a prayer, and nothing has changed that, but being brought close enough to be able to count the sparse freckles on her nose has shifted something in him to the forefront that he’s afraid might have been better off left buried.</p><p>He can’t try and puzzle out his thoughts, even with the buffer of time lag jet gives him, because she’s pulling her rifle aloft and peering around the edge of the wall. She snaps back into cover after less than a second with a confident look in her eye - it used to fucking astound him that she could get a read of the room that fast, but then again, Nora never failed to amaze. She looks to Hancock, and her gaze is lit up with cold calculation,  “I need you to fire off to the left, towards the rope bridge. I need just a bit of cover fire to line up a shot on the guy holding <em>my</em> missile launcher.”</p><p>He chuckles, and hopes whatever the fuck is clearly happening to him isn’t also clearly happening on his face, “Taking a prize?”</p><p>“Mmm, I think I deserve it.”</p><p>“Maybe <em> I </em>want it,” He teases as he strides up behind her, because teasing her feels safe and it’s what he always does.</p><p>She rolls her eyes, “I <em> distinctly </em> remember just pulling you out of the way of certain death. So I definitely think I get first dibs,” She drops down and kneels as he comes up to the edge of the cover, propping the butt against her shoulder as steadies her shot, and her looking up at from her position makes his heart stutter and <em> holy shit he refuses to think about Nora like that right now. </em></p><p>He catches himself. Right now? He means <em> forever. </em></p><p>He checks his shotgun to focus on something else besides <em>that</em> fucking image, but it keeps driving itself into his mind even while he tries to apply single minded attention to anything else but the leftover feeling of Nora’s body heat by his legs. He snaps the shotgun’s barrel into position harder than he needs to, pulling a jet inhaler from his pocket and taking a hit so deep that he physically feels it move from his lungs and into his veins. </p><p>Time drags slow as Nora holds her hand out, holding three fingers up. Her countdown is way too long, his senses left to do nothing other than be aware of her heat, her breath, even her heartbeat, as he watches her finger move down. <em> Two</em>. He finds himself focused on her nails, hyper aware that her fingernails, while chipped, are all painted black as night, and he semi-deliriously wonders how she managed to paint her nails and with what. <em> One. </em> He fills his lungs with air, the feeling euphoria and soothing himself into calming the racing energy in him, as her hand closes into a fist.</p><p>He pivots from behind her in a flash, stepping into the open doorway. He fires blindly towards the rope bridge, once, and then again, and then Nora’s rifle discharging a bullet deafens him, and he watches the raider with the launcher collapse with a hole the size of Hancock’s fist in his head, both him and the launch tumbling off the edge of the bridge and falling into the depths of the round chamber at the bottom before Hancock dances over the massive hole in the floor and spins back into cover to reload.</p><p>Grinning broadly, he risks a look around the corner again and whistles appreciatively at her handiwork on the corpse at the ground level, “Nice shot, sister!”</p><p>She grins in kind, just as wide, and he finds his breath caught in his throat at the warm way her full lips pull across her teeth - none missing, all perfectly straight and the whitest he had ever seen in person - and he decides that he’ll just avoid looking at her. <em> You’re too high</em>, he thinks to himself, reloading his shotgun with feverish intensity, <em> That’s why you can’t stop looking at her and thinking about her like this. Get a fucking grip. </em></p><p>Nora ducks out of cover again, and fires off two quick, booming shots. He used to think she might’ve been a fucking synth by how fast she could line up a perfect headshot - it was always so deadly accurate that there had to be some Institute witchcraft there, right? But he’d also seen her get nearly eviscerated by a super mutant that got too close and saw nothing mechanical of the supposed mechanical components, just way too much blood and way too many organs, and the rest of the small doubt that used to exist was banished by hearing from Valentine about the pneumonia bout that laid her up at the Agency for two weeks.</p><p>He ducks around the corner, landing a shot to a raider dead in the chest, but is driven back by a covering fire of bullets. He hears a bullet ricochet behind him, and a quick look to the side of him shows a growing hole is being torn through the wall, and he shouts to Nora, “The walls are barely holding together, we need better cover!”</p><p>Nora peers over at her own cover, and her scowl is answer enough for him. With a nod, they dive out of cover and enter the open fray of the raiders. Months of travelling together had granted them a hard-won sync that effectively made them an army of two. And it <em> was </em>hard-won, more than he’d ever like to admit; Hancock tended to wield his shotgun with a ferocious boldness that bordered on suicidal some days, and Nora’s a shadow in combat, appearing from nowhere to demolish entire bands of raiders before they were even aware that they were under attack. In the beginning, the wildly different approaches led to Hancock being frustrated with being left to deal with close-quarters combat almost alone when Nora would disappear into the darkness, and Nora exasperated, as she never got the time to pick off the worst enemies she could see before his activities drew the attention of the rest of the hostiles. </p><p>Now, it is a seamless collaboration; Hancock marches forward as proudly as the patriot he emulated, blowing the top off of a raider’s skull. He can’t hear her, but he can <em> feel </em> her, somehow, and when a raider rises up out of cover to take a shot at Hancock as he reloads, they promptly collapse as Hancock’s unseen guardian puts a round blows through their trachea. It’s not easy, nor is it quick, but Hancock blows raiders to pieces with reckless abandon as Nora picks off the adversaries that lie out of his weapon’s range, and when they move through much narrower halls and it becomes too close quarters for it, Nora switches out her rifle for the 10mm pistol at her thigh, and joins Hancock’s side in the thick of it with a viciousness that excitingly reminds him of himself. </p><p>Their victory is announced by the sound of the last raider falling back over a railing in his death throes and crunching into the dirt pit on the lowest level. Nora doesn’t even wait a breath after the raider’s body hits the bottom level before she starts searching crates. The Nora he knows has never been someone that dwells on victory, which is a damn shame, but she’s a woman of practicality and strict moderation - she’ll smoke a cigarette if offered but never carries her own pack, he can convince her to get drunk with him at the Third Rail once in a while after particularly difficult missions, but never will she indulge chems, and she never takes it to true, gluttonous excess like what Hancock is used to. She declines politely every time they’re offered, no matter how insistently he tries to persuade her, and he has long since stopped trying to convince her to partake, and he knows she uses some sleight of hand trick to deliver the chems he gives her - ‘you look like you could use a pick me up’ - back on to his person. </p><p>Hancock pays no mind to Nora busying herself with looting. He deposits his shotgun into it’s holster to free his hands and light up a celebratory cigarette, and he stretches his arms high above his head with a grin to bask in their victory as he takes a long pull. He looks at Nora as she hunches over a crate she pried open with a dead raider’s crowbar, “So, how much junk are you gonna stuff into that bag before we can fuckin’ get out of here?” </p><p>“Ha ha, you are <em> very </em>funny,” She deadpans, ignoring his snickers as she tucks away an old, decayed alarm clock into her pack, “And also ungrateful. This is to finally get electricity into the house you like, for your information.” </p><p>“I’m sure the hot plate you’re trying to fit in there will be a game changer,” He says dryly, and the glowering look she sends him has enough venom that, had he been a lesser man, would’ve made him cower. This look only made him feel gleeful, and he grins without feeling even a bit chastised. </p><p>She rolls her eyes with a sigh, but after a moment of fiddling with her bag, she accepts that she isn’t going to get the hot plate to fit, and hands it to him in defeat, “Fine. We can head out. I think if we double back over that walkway, we should be able to retrace our steps easily enough and head back to Sanctuary. I still want that missile launcher,” she says, gesturing to the pit about ten or fifteen feet below them, “So keep an eye out for a way down that isn’t going to break my ankles.”</p><p>He hums, gesturing for her to spin. She complies without question, and with a deft hand, he arranges the junk stuffed into her bag and gets the hot plate nestled on top, doing his best to close the broken clasp of the bag. And then shakes his head, completely in disbelief that he's actually indulging her hoarding habit.</p><p>He smacks the pack to let her know that it's tucked away safely, and she huffs indignantly, "I don't get how you're so good at that."</p><p>"There's a really good joke there about shoving something big into a tight place. It's lingering in the air, just in front of me..." He says dreamily, like he's viewing something beautiful.</p><p>She makes a face and waves her hands as if she could physically wave away his lechery from the air, "I don't want to fucking hear it, Hancock."</p><p>He cackles, watching as she proceeded up the exceptionally narrow and unsteady walkway of scrap planks leading to the landing across and above, and Hancock regarded the path with more bitterness than it deserved, “I’ll never understand why raiders insist on making their walkways so damn narrow.”</p><p>Nora steps up onto it, and even facing away, he can hear her biting back a grin, “Why? Is the great John Hancock afraid of heights?”</p><p>“No, but the great John Hancock <em>is </em>just as much of a chem connoisseur as raiders are, and unstable, fuck-off narrow walkways like that is putting way too much faith in the coordination of someone that’s completely fucked up. Like, <em>c’mon</em>; if you’re gonna build the walk way for you and your chem’d out buddies, why wouldn’t they, oh, I don’t know, minimize some fuckin’ risk?”</p><p>She laughs, “Careful, Hancock; you’re starting to sound like me,” Turning to look at him over her shoulder, she smiles teasingly, “Don’t be a baby, come on.”</p><p>The fading fires of the hideout catch her silhouette just right and… damn, who could say no to a face like that? And so he sighs with much more flair than he feels, stepping up onto the walkway as Nora sarcastically golf claps his accomplishment like a proud mother hen before turning to continue up the precarious walkway. </p><p>He is about a quarter of the way there when he hears wood snapping and Nora’s startled gasp. </p><p>His head snaps up as Nora skitters back a step, getting her weight off the fragile wood before the whole thing snaps in two, but she moves back with more speed than caution. Her quick and instinctive movement shifts the plank bearing her weight underfoot, sending the far end over the edge and into the pit thirty feet below them, Nora tumbling with a sharp scream along with it.</p><p>“Fucking <em>shit</em><em>!</em>” He snarls, diving forward despite the instability of his own foothold for her hand. His fingertips make contact with her wrist for a millisecond, but she falls faster than he can secure a grip on her, and her hand slips out from between his fingers. His heart falls into the lowest pit of his stomach as she falls, as her cry echoes around him, feeling himself lurch like he was the one falling as she hits off against an outcropped landing. Her body hits a steel cage in the lowest level, and then suddenly she’s making no sound at all, and he feels himself go ice cold as she finally hits the dirt at the bottom.</p><p>The quiet that follows after almost makes him wish that she was still screaming, “You okay down there?” He tries for casual even though his breath is fast and suffocated as he looks down at her prone, unanswering form, his chest empty and his heart gone, having fallen out of him. If he dared to look away, he is sure he’d see his heart laying somewhere at his feet somewhere. "Nora!" He waits a second, two, and then shouts out to her again, not even caring at how broken and terrified he sounds, “<b><em>NORA!</em></b>”</p><p>She shifts, then moves with a pained but <em>lucid</em> groan, and he almost collapses in relief, holding his hand to his chest - heart is still there, apparently, but it’s pounding so hard and loud in his chest that it physically hurts.</p><p> “I’m okay,” she  calls to him, breathlessly, as she pushes herself onto her knees, complaining out loud, “Don’t try coming down this way, I really don’t recommend it..”</p><p>He laughs deliriously, “Remind me never the listen to you ever fuckin’ again,” He calls, his worry bleeding away as she looks up at him, appearing fine besides a nasty gash on her chin, and he shakes his head in utter disbelief, “Only you would fall thirty fucking feet and be goddamned fine at the bottom.”</p><p>She shrugs with a grin, “What can I say? I -”</p><p>A deep, bellowing growl echoes through the chamber, and they both go as still as statues. Nora turns, slowly, so slowly, barely moving to peer around the steel cage towards a hole that is ripped in the side of the wall at the far end of the pit less than twenty feet from where she stands. Heavy, non-human footsteps shake the ground as a beast-like rumble echoes out from the hole-in-the-wall. He can’t look away from Nora, not wanting confirmation of what he knows is coming from around the corner, and her eyes return to him, wide and round in terror. She mouths to him, <em> Don’t. Move. </em></p><p>Hancock looks against his better judgment to the darkness as the massive, hulking shape of a deathclaw lumbers out of the shadows. Which is just… fucking <em>spectacularly </em>bad on a good day where they have distance and the element of surprise. But they are separated with Nora trapped down in the pit with it, out of his reach, low on ammo and stimpaks from taking down the raiders that preceded it, and he can’t get down to her to split supplies without diving head first into a fucking <em>deathclaw</em>. </p><p>He tries to think, wishing he had some fucking mentats left to figure out what the fuck he is supposed to do. He looks at her meaningfully, then to the ledge she had said was too high to jump down from. She shakes her head slowly, eyes peeking to her peripheral at the deathclaw, and she mouths, <em> I won’t make it. </em></p><p><em> You’ll make it </em>, He mouths. Deathclaws can’t climb, right? Hopefully not? He could pull her up, because if he can just get her up out of that pit, if they run, they just might make it - </p><p>She shakes her head more insistently as she slowly removes her pack off of her back, resting it near the cage, and he would tear his hair out in frustration if all his hair hadn’t been burned out of his body by ghoulification. She’s looking vacantly at something off to her left, away from the deathclaw, and he follows her line of sight to the missile launcher, still strapped to the raider. </p><p><em> Is she out of her fucking mind? </em> He wants to scream, forcing down the hysterical laugh that threatens to bubble out of him, and he shakes his head furiously. She wants to try and fight the goddamned deathclaw? Does this woman have a goddamned fucking <em>deathwish</em>?</p><p>She nods towards the ledge that drops down to the pit with a silent command, and Hancock moves towards it despite the madness of this idea, knowing they have no other feasible option, despite every scrap of common sense he has left telling him to stay still or run in the opposite direction. Fear is fire and ice in his blood, what fear he felt from almost being obliterated by the missile launcher barely even atomic compared to how terrified he feels now. Nora is so close to it, and each suspicious step the deathclaw takes to follow the human scent brings it that much closer to her, and the proximity seizes Hancock’s heart in a vice that drives him to move, matching Nora’s pace as she sneaks down below.</p><p>She is almost past the steel cage, the missile launcher only a few paces away, and she is slowly maneuvering through a narrow spot to get around rubble between herself and the corpse when her pack spills open, the contents having shifted from Nora placing it on the ground. Scrap falls out of the bag as the clasp breaks open, and Hancock watches as the dumbass, motherfucking, godforsaken <em>hotplate</em> tumbles out of the pack, over the landslide of other scrap, and then strikes against one of the cage's bars. The ringing clangs of steel striking steel is <em> deafening </em> in the silence, and it echoes in endless, mocking reverberations as Hancock and Nora freeze. </p><p>There is a beat of complete silence where neither of them move, only looking at each other desperately. When Hancock can bring himself to look up, he swears his heart stops dead in his chest. The deathclaw is staring directly at Nora with single minded, <em>hungry</em> intent, and all Hancock can manage to say is, “Oh, <em> shit.” </em></p><p>And then everything goes to hell.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>*shows up six years late with starbucks* hey guys what did i miss </p><p>a friend of mine generously gave me a ps4 she had won at a work event for christmas, and so ive been furiously playing fallout 4 during any free time.  i missed the john hancock bandwagon by a lot and i have fallen deeply in love with this horrible ghoul man, so please enjoy. this whole fanfic was spawned by the fact i did this mission way too early in the game, experienced an astonishing comedy of errors where 1) hancock took a missile to the face, 2) i fell off a walkway and into the pit but somehow managed to avoid fall damage, and 3) immediately got DEMOLISHED by the deathclaw, and then this fanfic happened.</p><p>please enjoy this self-indulgent mess &lt;3</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter II</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>imagine. you're me. you have severe adhd. your medication just got upped. you are so consumed witht he drive to write that you crack out a 4000 word fanficition between the hours of 1am to 4am on a work night. you post it without thinking about it. you look at the fanfiction a few days later and discover two things:<br/>1. big pieces of it completely don't make sense because i didn't elaborate in the slightest, or are completely inconsistent<br/>2. you managed to describe your own sole survivor's appearance completely, inexcusably incorrectly. </p><p>you feel remorse that you will be gaslighting readers if you don't explain why the fuck everything is suddenly different, and hope that people understand that you're an agent of chaos sometimes.</p><p>you learn nothing from this experience and write the second chapter at 4 in the morning.</p><p>tldr: ive got dumb bitch disease and im also on a lot of adderall. on the plus side, chapter one has new content to read wooooowwwwww</p><p>moral to the story: don't write fanfiction while strung out on adderall. i know this is the second chapter in a row that im doing this but like shhhhhh</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Of course raiders would find a way to keep a fucking <em> deathclaw </em> in the basement. Of <em>course</em>. And of course Nora, the most sure footed and graceful person he’s ever met in his entire life would manage to land on the only unsteady plank in the walkway. And, y’know, because today was already so much of a fucking disaster, Nora can fall into the deathclaw pit. Sure! And Nora - <em>Nora -</em> who could be right at his side one second and then <em> vanish </em>in the next breath, who had given him more than his fair share of heart attacks with this ability, would have the deathclaw’s attention to her location by a bullshit twist of happenstance.</p><p>Because <em>of-fucking-course</em> this is what happens. He bets Valentine doesn’t deal with this shit. He bets fucking Valentine has never had to stare down a deathclaw just because Nora asked him nicely to be a travel buddy. </p><p>What a clusterfuck.</p><p>And he wishes he wasn’t so fucking high, because his brain is so razor sharp that he feels it slice against his skull and spill ice cold fear over his mind as his train of thought splits in two - one train spins off, lamenting the chronic bad luck that damns both himself and Nora to deal with situations like this, and the other careens towards the deathclaw’s reptilian gaze being locked on Nora, and he knows that deathclaw is sizing her up, gauging how easy it’ll be to rip her in half, or smash her skull against one of the rocks in the pit, or maybe even just bite her head off, and <em> why isn’t Nora moving - </em></p><p>The deathclaw bellows a deep, menacing rumble, and the promise of death vibrates the cavern in a tense noise that seizes the air of the room and robs Hancock of breath. “Oh, <em> shit,” </em> breaks the silence that followed, because Hancock can’t even help it. It slips through clenched teeth, breaking the silent, lingering standoff. Maybe it’s been two minutes, maybe it’s been two seconds, but it breaks the spell like he slammed his fist home into his own personal nuclear launch button: the deathclaw broadens its stance and <em> roars</em>, the glass window behind it shattering into a million pieces. </p><p>The roar snaps Nora out of her ‘frozen-prey’ approach, and Hancock races in pursuit - she turns about face and takes off after the missile launcher at the same time Hancock leaps to his feet and takes off towards the ledge to drop into the pit after her. The deathclaw stalks towards Nora as she tears the missile launcher’s ammo belt off of the raider’s corpse and throws it around her, her hands taking the launcher by the handles to lift the entire thing over her shoulder as she takes off like a shot towards the furthest end of the chamber. <em> Good</em>, he thinks, s<em>he’s making distance, buying time to reload, </em>and then his mind becomes hyper fixated on how easily she threw a missile launcher as long as she is tall, and - she’s pretty slender, always has been, but then he finds himself wondering how what kind of muscle she’s got hiding under her ill-fitted, scavenged clothes, since it’s such an impressive show of casual strength that it’s actually kind of hot -</p><p>- why the fuck is occupying his brain with that? A deathclaw is less than twenty feet away from trying to fucking eat Nora and he - he’s thinking about <em> Nora </em> like - and, well, he’s too high, for one fucking thing, if this is what he’s thinking about in life and death. He didn’t think he still had that kind of threshold any more, and while it took Death staring down his best friend, he fucking found it, and he is officially too high to have the fucking sense to save her from a goddamned fucking deathclaw, and the thought <em> terrifies him</em>. Fear like he’s never felt slips under his skin and moves so violently through him that he’d think he might drop into a seizure if his mind wasn’t so clear. He feels insane and suffocated by his skin, and he has always known how grief drives some ghouls into going feral - grief has a way of dragging people into insanity, and he has never faulted the ghouls that throw their humanity aside to escape the agony of their loss because he’s known enough pain to know how tempting it can be to throw everything away to escape it. But he watches that deathclaw go for Nora, and he thinks that if he is - if he’s not strong enough, or fast enough, or <em> enough </em> to save her, if he can’t protect her, if he has to live the rest of his eternity knowing that he’s to blame for -</p><p>“Hancock!” Nora cries, and when his eyes snap to her, her face is set into a resolute expression of frenzied determination, “The latch is jammed, I need five seconds!”</p><p>The deathclaw draws close, lumbering around the cage with a tauntingly slow gait - or maybe Hancock’s mind is bending time - and the position of the cage forces it into a space near the ledge closest to him. Hancock’s fear bleeds to nothing as an idea takes shape in his mind, not when the price he would pay by letting his fear consume him is so high. </p><p><em>Yeah</em>, he thinks, <em>I can give her five seconds.</em> <em>But I’m gonna do something fucking stupid to do it.</em></p><p>Regardless of what he does, he can’t get under the deathclaw safely to get at the soft underbelly with his shotgun, so he doesn’t unholster the shotgun. In a smooth motion, he takes the knife strapped to his side under his coat, holding it, spinning it, counting each breath that is slowed by jet, waiting, waiting - the deathclaw is close, closer, almost there - he can <em> almost </em> - </p><p>It passes by the ledge, and Hancock <em> moves </em> - he races out of cover, opposite to the deathclaw and gets a running start, and leaps towards it.</p><p>His body hits the side of the deathclaw <em> hard</em>, the density of the scales almost knocking the breath from his lungs. The deathclaw stumbles so hard from the unexpected weight that Hancock thinks it’s going to fall over, growling in rage and bemusement. He can feel the jet fading, and knows that the edge the chem offers him in this moment is running out. Head tucked low, Hancock saddles into the hump behind its head, gripping his knife with a white knuckled grip. </p><p>Steadying his perch, Hancock grits his teeth through a grin as he looks through the horns of the now enraged deathclaw to Nora, who is looking at him the most organic combination of shock and utter exasperation that he can’t help the burst of almost feral laughter that rips from him, “Five seconds, sunshine? I’ll give ya fuckin’ <em>ten</em>!”</p><p>Hancock ducks under a furious swipe from the deathclaw, getting his feet under him and against the deathclaw’s armoured hump to push himself forward. Each second ticks by faster, faster, the mental acuity and time delay that made jet such a good combat drug draining from him quickly, far too quickly. He maneuvers between the horns deftly, brings his prized knife high above his head and drives it home through the deathclaw’s beady eye socket.</p><p>The furious, pained roar it lets out leaves Hancock’s ears ringing so loudly that every sound is drowned out. His head is screaming, ears wet with blood, and Hancock snarls. He yanks the blade out again, driving it back into the deathclaws eye again, and again, and again - </p><p>He looks up - Nora is screaming something at him, something he can’t hope to hear over the roaring of the deathclaw and his own ears until he only hears the ringing in his ears, but she’s got the loaded launcher up over her shoulder, and he can do the math to figure out what she is saying. He drives the blade home as hard and as deep as he can, and when the deathclaw rears forward to crush Hancock in it’s hands, Hancock lets go of the horns and lets himself fall from the head of the half blind deathclaw. He hits the ground gracelessly, his deafness tangling his feet to stumble over themselves. Even when it forces him to his knees, he drags himself in a scrambling crawl into cover behind rubble just as Nora takes aim and lets the missile fly. </p><p>The blast hits home against the deathclaw’s underbelly, throwing it back several steps and just about blasting off Hancock’s tricorn. His shotgun is in his hand in a second, ducking out from behind the concrete slab and  unloading both shots into the burned and bleeding wound Nora’s missile had left. His ears are still ringing so hard that he feels, rather than hears, the deathclaw’s approach as he attempts to get his unsteady legs beneath him and drive some distance between himself a deathclaw that now has a grudge to settle. She’s loading another missile shot, and that could be enough to do it - if he gets to her quick enough, they can make a break for the exit the deathclaw crawled out of and try to lose it out in the wasteland.</p><p>It’s a great plan until a massive hand grabs and throws Hancock like a ragdoll.</p><p>He narrowly misses breaking his spine against a crumbled support beam, but the ground is an inevitability that hurts just as bad as he expects. He doesn’t feel anything break, but it knocks him completely breathless and sends his lungs spasming. He feels like he’s choking, drowning as his lungs refuse to bring in air, everything aching and burning now that he can’t breathe, but even through the haze, his eyes wheel to look for Nora as he tries to force himself to his feet despite his entire body screaming in protest. </p><p>A sharp flash of light, another rumble as a second missile strikes home against the deathclaw, tearing open a massive, charcoal black gash in its abdomen. The dirt soaks with the deathclaw’s blood, but it shakes off a wound that should have killed it, and Hancock is running despite his feet refusing to cooperate with his wishes. The deathclaw is furious, hunching down onto all fours as it charges towards Nora, and her fingers are reloading the launcher impressively fucking quick considering but it’s not quick enough. Even if Hancock could breathe, he wouldn’t be able to - her fingers click the missile home, turning to line up her aim, but the deathclaw is too close for it to matter. Then it’s on Nora, rearing a single clawed hand back, far to the side, and then drives it into Nora’s side with all of its strength.</p><p>Her body - God, her <em> body </em> - is sent sliding across the dirt, rolling wildly until Hancock falls to his knees and catches her. His heart seizes when she doesn’t clamor to her feet like she always does, but he can’t check on her now, not when the deathclaw’s only surviving eye fixated on them together, Hancock’s knife still buried hilt deep in the other. The launcher is strapped to her, and he drags it out from under her shoulder, trying not to think about the way her entire body tenses and her mouth opens in a scream he can’t hear as he lifts the launcher onto his shoulder. It is awkward, heavy, and nothing like what he’s used to using, but he doesn’t exactly have the luxury to adjust accordingly. He stays kneeling, remembering one of the times Nora showed him a few long range tricks on the road: she had murmured in his ear that kneeling could steady his shot as she arranged his elbows in ways that were allegedly better form, and he made a decidedly filthy joke about being on his knees that he remembers made her groan and laugh. </p><p>He remembers her words, arranging his elbows like he remembers as he lines up the shot against the deathclaw. Hancock watches it roar at him without sound through the view of the aiming guide.</p><p>“Eat this, motherfucker,” he feels himself say, and Hancock pulls the trigger.</p><p>He must be channelling Nora - the shot hits it dead on, and the deathclaw stumbles back, entire body lurching, and though it fights to stay on it’s feet, it had already lost too much of it’s blood before Hancock’s shot opened up it’s stomach to the world, and it finally collapses in a heap into the dirt, and does not move again. </p><p>When he’s sure the beast is dead, Hancock's eyes turn to the woman curled in the fetal position. He crouches over her trembling form, placing a hand on her shoulder and gently but firmly rolling her onto her back, her expression contorted in pain as she spasms. She mumbles something to him, or - or maybe she’s speaking to him - or shouting, even. The ringing in his ears has subsided, but whatever she is saying is muffled as if she is far away, rather than right beneath him. He squints, trying to focus on what words her mouth is shaping, but he can’t figure it out, her voice an indistinguishable, muffled sound.</p><p>He shakes his head, and when he speaks, his voice feels clumsy in his throat without being able to modulate his voice through hearing, “Can’t hear you, sunshine. I think the deathclaw blew out my ear drums.”</p><p>Even through what he imagines is unspeakable pain, her eyebrows twist with concern for <em> him, </em> and she mouths with intention, ‘<em>I'm fine. Are you okay? </em>’</p><p>“I only got an impromptu lesson in flying, I’ll be fine,” He smiles when her lips spread in a grin, her throat moving to tell him that he's made her laugh, but it fades as her expression collapses into agony. He can’t think of where her pack is right now, with the last remaining stock of stimpaks tucked safely inside it’s pockets, but he knows he always keeps a spare in his inner coat pocket, right beside his jet, and it's even still intact when he pull it from his front pocket. He’s not sure what he sounds like, but he bets he can’t keep the worry from his voice when he tells her, “You, on the other hand, are not <em> fine</em>. I’m going to help take your chest plate off and move your shirt, because I got a stimpak with your name on it. You got it from there?” </p><p>She is so astonishingly pale, her face white from pain, and there's a long moment where she simply drags in breaths that make her shoulders tremble, then she says something with a shake of her head. Hancock's brows furrow in concern - if she was admitting she couldn’t get it herself, she must be in <em> agony</em>, because Nora hated people doing things for her and it showed on her face how much she hated asking. He wants to lighten the mood with a joke, but he knows when he can and can’t tease her, and this is solidly in the ‘can’t’ territory, so he simply asks, “You ready?”</p><p>She says something that he guesses is in the spirit of ‘this is going to fucking kill’, then she nods, her body tight with pain. He works the clasps holding her chest armour securely until they come loose, pulling the front of the piece off and laying it to the side. He sucks in a breath through his teeth when he discovers that blood has soaked through three large tears ripped through the left side of her under armour. It’s enough blood to saturate the front of her shirt and enough to make his heart stutter a painful beat. He grabs the hem of shirt, looking at her meaningfully in a way that she understands immediately, and she responds by grabbing his knee with the arm opposite to her wounded side, then nods stiffly.</p><p>Carefully, he begins to roll her shirt up over her stomach, her skin astonishingly smooth and even - not a fucking scar in sight. The sight makes him pause, the urgency moments ago dashed as he looks over the blank canvas of flesh. Now, normally, this’d be an opportunity to soak in a woman who didn’t even leave the house without being covered head-to-toe, but her skin is so perfectly smooth that it borders on being impossible.</p><p>With the way she chooses to live on the roads of the Commonwealth, she should at the very least have a few bullet scars.  She’s had to have taken serious enough wounds to scar - the one from the super mutant that just about gutted her comes to mind off the top of his head. There’s no evidence of that scar anywhere across her stomach. Nor does he see any bullet wound, or knife scar, or burn - nothing at all. Which was... Okay, benefit of the doubt - maybe stimpaks did their magic and healed up even the scar tissue, if he stretches the truth to it's breaking point. But if by some miracle she’s managed to go without a wound that ended up being serious enough to scar when travelling with him or Nick, then maybe when she was younger, before she was, well, <em> herself</em>. Before she was dangerous, cunning, and serious, before she was all that and still came with a strong sense of right and wrong and a resolve to always act on that compass, loyal to a fault, quick-witted, and feral enough that it not only kept Hancock on his toes with her but kept him coming back for more. She had to have been someone before she was this. Someone that was maybe a stupid teenager like he’d been, and jumped off a ledge that was too high or fought someone out of her league, or a child that cracked her head against a table when she was learning to walk. Anything.</p><p>Hancock has seen and intimately known countless bodies in his day, men and women and all of the people that fell outside or in-between, and not one of them had ever been without scars. No one can afford to have skin as unblemished as this in their world.</p><p>And he tries to fill in the gap that her uncannily unmarked body has pointed out to his conscious mind, and there’s a slow dawning thought as he realizes, truly, he knows nothing of Nora’s past. Not where she’s from, how she grew up, anything. Everything he can summon in his mind of what he knows about her goes back only as far as when she gunned down Finn inside Goodneighbor’s front gate. He found out later that Goodneighbor was a simply stop for her, seeking work wherever she could find, including from goddamned fucking <em> Bobbi, </em>and using those earned caps to buy entirely too many weapon supplies for… something. He doesn’t know what they were for, what she was up to, nor did he think it was his business to ask at the time, but knows that Nick knows, because when Hancock offered his services and his company to her, the very first thing she did was smuggle him into Diamond City to look for the detective. It isn't his business, but it gnaws him in an uncomfortable, uneasy way and he hates that he's been left in the dark.</p><p>She clearly likes and appreciates Hancock - she would stroll up and ask for his company on more of her travels than anyone else. Nick was her other choice, but it was rare and it was always for short, seemingly vicious stints, if the exhaustion weighing down on her when she returned was anything to go by. Piper had offered, but he had yet to see Nora accept the standing offer and ask Piper along. Nora isn’t great with feelings, but neither is he, and that suits them both fine. If he can trust her to drag him bodily out of the way of a missile, and know that she trusts him to do the same is enough to clear doubt that his degree of admiration and trust wasn’t reciprocated. But something unnerves him about the realization that he knows <em>nothing</em> about who she had been before she met him. Maybe he knows for sure that she's not an Institute synth, since she's wrapped up so tight with Nick and Nick wouldn't suffer any business like that, no matter how temping the caps, but there's a deep feeling that unsettles Hancock to look at her and know he has no answers about Nora.</p><p>His mind feels like it's racing, but he knows he has paused too long because Nora is looking at him with a look that manages to be wry despite the clear tightness of the expression. Her mouth forms some sentences, but he doesn’t pay attention. Instead, Hancock tucks his thoughts away for later when he has mentats and distance, measures his expression, and moves on, rolling the shirt higher until it reaches the point that he has to pull the sticking fabric off the gouges in her side. Her fingernails dig sharp crescent moons against his knee as she unconsciously arches with the movement to keep him from peeling off the fabric that's stuck to her flesh, her grip only tightening further as she moves her injured body. He continues, each painful roll of peeling fabric off her injury adding force to her effort to stab him through his pants with her fingernails.</p><p>He rolls the shirt up to just beneath her breasts, keeping her modesty covered like the perfectly respectful gentleman he absolutely is not. He slips a hand beneath her hip and lifts slightly to get the bleeding wound into better view. Her entire left side down to her waist is a kaleidoscope of angry reds and pinks, speckled, dotted, and marbled in what is going to be a vicious bruise by tomorrow. Based on the familiar pattern of bruising, he guesses that she has broken some ribs: further confirmed by the way her entire body has become a tense line just by his hand minutely shifting her body, and though she doesn’t look like she’s screaming, the muscles of her neck are quivering and her jaw is clenched so tight that he worries for her teeth. What he is most worried about most is the slashes in her ribs, and he shifts closer to see them, arranging an awkward perch over top of her. The gashes are wide, long, but shallow, stretching from the bottom of her ribcage to around her back, and he breathes a massive sigh of relief. Had she been even a little less lucky, this is an attack that would’ve, at a minimum, eviscerated her. He doesn’t think she’d agree, but he’d take broken ribs over that any day.</p><p>He pulls the stimpak from his coat, pulling the small plastic stopper off the end of the needle with his teeth. He counts down from three out loud for her benefit, then smoothly injects the medication in between two ribs with motions that are so familiar that he feels a rare twinge of shame about it. She tenses, her hand becoming white knuckled on his knee. He withdraws the needle the instant the plunger hits the bottom of the vial, only a small bead of blood welling before the medication seals the injection site closed. She is still tense with agony, and she gratefully accepts his offered hand as a substitute for his kneecap as he slowly lowers onto her back. Her grip is so tight that it’s physically painful, but Hancock voices no complaint, only murmuring encouragement he's not sure he's saying loud enough to be audible. Gradually, as the stimpak works it’s magic, she begins to barely relax, and Hancock gets a front row seat to watch her wounds begin to clot and stitch back together.</p><p>Her grip slackens on his hand as she her mouth drops open into a small 'o', her shoulders trembling as she lets out a strained, shuddering sigh. He sits back, pulling himself from his perch to kneel, careful to not rest his weight on her. Her bare hip is warm and soft under his lingering touch, and he tries not to think of that, and he is trying to resist the compulsion to look dumbly at his hand resting on her skin when she squeezes his other hand. This time the touch is reassuring rather than an unspoken testament to her suffering, and he reads a ‘thank you’ off her lips. The gravity of the gesture suddenly strikes him with those words, and - he was thinking it before, how much Nora hates to be helped, and yet she admitted with little hesitation that she didn’t think she could do it. She could have lied, grit her teeth, and suffered through the movement of arranging and injecting the stimpak herself - and she <em> has </em>, in the past, endured self-inflicted torture if it meant not needing to wound her own pride, but she didn’t. Vulnerability was a rare thing to find these days, and yet one of the toughest women he knew, outdone maybe only by Fahrenheit, felt safe enough with him to admit that. Trusted him.</p><p>Maybe she had skeletons in her closet that she preferred to leave buried. But it meant much more to him that she trusted him in moments like this.</p><p>He squeezes her hand twice in response, and he manages a smile as he takes her hand in both of his and asks, “It might take one more stimpak to get you on your feet. I’ll go grab your pack and we’ll get your properly set up.”</p><p>Standing and brushing himself off, he steps around the dead deathclaw and the innards it has spilled across the floor with a twist of his mouth. The pack is where it was left, some of the contents having fallen in the dirt, and he crouches to stuff them back in the bag with a shake of his head. When everything is secure and he's typing together the leather straps of the buckle instead of bothering with the clasp, he spots the hotplate, still leaning against the cage bars. He scowls at it, picking the bag off the ground without packing the damned thing away again. He grunts as he hefts the bag over his shoulder, the weight much more than he would have anticipated, and he found himself wondering what the fuck she even had in this thing that was so important that she was willing to carry the equivalent of a human being around all the time.</p><p>He sighs. It was probably eight hundred fucking tin cans, knowing her. He turns and drop kicks the fucking hot plate across the room, because it makes him feel better about almost dying because of literal garbage.</p><p>The bag is dropped at her side, and he pulls open the ties holding the side pockets closed, retrieving another stimpak for Nora. He settles at her side again, holding the medication out to her for her to take. Instead, she gingerly props herself up to push the stimpak back into his hand. He blinks in surprise, then confusion, and says, “I’ll make do without. We’re pretty short on stock, Sunshine; we’re not close enough to Goodneighbor, and I don't trust that raiders gave us enough leftovers to work with.” She pushes the stimpak more insistently into his hands, pushing herself up until she’s in a sitting position despite the deep crease that forms between her brows, and he sighs in exasperation, “<em>I’m</em> not the one that narrowly avoided getting ripped in half by a fucking deathclaw.”</p><p>She rolls her eyes, her mouth moving to form a sentence too complex for him to lip read. He scowls, frustrated, but then she laughs, and he can’t help but chuckle along, too, even though he can’t hear her, rubbing a hand over his face at the absurdity of it. Sitting there, squinting at her mouth as if it’s some kind of fuckin’ puzzle like a weirdo. He can’t even fit in a way he could twist into an innuendo.</p><p> A soft, warm finger touches his chin, and he looks up with a sharp jolt, the touch catching him by surprise. Nora is leaning up, still pale but looking better every second, and reaches out that finger to tap the stimpak, then taps her own ear. Then, she points to the deathclaw and makes a gesture like she’s throwing a basketball. </p><p>He can’t help the snort that comes out of him, and he says, “I promise I’m okay, sister.”</p><p>She raises an eyebrow so suspiciously that he knows she doesn’t believe him for a second. She makes a hand gesture emulating an outward explosion from her ear, just to prove a point.</p><p>“That wasn’t so bad,” The look she gives him is flat and unconvinced, so he raises his hands in surrender, “Okay, alright, fuckin’ fine - getting thrown by the deathclaw wasn’t nearly as fun as it was advertised. But I stand by the fact the earblast wasn't that bad.”</p><p>And that’s becoming more and more true with every passing moment - now that he doesn’t feel like he’s seconds from losing her to blood loss, the aching, bruising feeling is becoming harder and harder to ignore, his head is pounding, and a sharp pain deep in his ear is made even more miserable by a high pitched ringing that won't fade. When he wipes the side of his head by his ear with the back of his hand, his hand comes away bloody, and when he looks away from the blood marking his ruined skin, her expression is so sincerely worried that he simply resigns to the fact she’s not going to take the fucking stimpak, even if he refuses.  </p><p>He isn’t careful or considerate with the placement of the needle for his stimpak - enough years of practice and a high tolerance for the prick of a needle have made that a moot concern for him even when he was human. Being a ghoul allows him a little more carelessness than his human body would have ever allowed, and he pushes that to it’s limit in true hedonistic fashion, needles injected anywhere he can find a good vein if that's what the high requires. He prods along his neck with two fingers, finding a spot where he’s almost sure that he won’t accidentally stab a vertebrae with the needle, and inserts the needle into his neck and pushes the healing contents of the vial into his body. </p><p>He removes the empty syringe from his neck, laying the spent needle down alongside the other and then moving them both somewhere they won’t step on it. He doesn’t know why he bothers, but he has a feeling that if he doesn’t put it somewhere safe, he’ll set off a butterfly effect that will end up with both of them dead, and it’s not a chance he’s willing to take. He firmly rubs the soreness from the injection site, then makes sardonic jazz hands to mock her for her insistence on caring for him, but she smiles and laughs and swats him and - fuck, it’s corny as hell but he’s damned pleased with himself that he’s one of the few people that’s able to make her laugh. A real laugh, not the fake shit she uses to rip people off; the one where her eyes crinkle almost all the way closed, her nose scrunches, and she almost always muffles herself behind her hand or her elbow to hide the inevitable snort that follows if he really gets her going - </p><p>Fucking hell. He left the comfort of Goodneighbor to go gunning down raiders and tyrants alike, and he still managed to go soft. </p><p>His left ear pops, and when he’s rubbing the discomfort from his now functioning ear drum, the right pops, and while it’s uncomfortable as hell, at least he isn’t deaf anymore. He snaps his fingers by his right ear, then his left, and finds them both good as new. He grumbles, finding it odd to hear the rumble of his own voice, “Looks like we’re back in business.”</p><p>“Oh, good,” Nora says, entirely too sweetly, and he looks up nervously. She shifts closer to her pack, wincing as she reaches in one of the pockets to grab something, and she thwacks him hard over the head with a fucking <em>newspaper</em>.</p><p>“What the fuck-”</p><p>“You are fucking insane. Completely out of your goddamned mind, John Hancock! You just about fucking stopped my goddamned heart!”</p><p>“Dammit, sister, I’m not your damned mutt! Stop smacking me!” When she gives one more good thwack, he catches her wrist, returning her scowl in equal measure. </p><p>There’s a firm twist to her mouth that is so petulant it makes her less intimidating and more - dare he even say it, but - cute, and he shouldn’t smirk, but he does. She thrashes, fractured ribs and all, to thwack him again, but he holds her still. </p><p>“You’re gonna hurt yourself-”</p><p>“-that is <em> rich </em>, coming from the man that jumped on a deathclaw like it was rodeo bull-”</p><p>“What? You got something against cowboys?</p><p>If his quip throws her off, it doesn't show, and she snaps back without hesitation so venomously that he can't help but snicker, “You don’t get to <em> also </em> be a cowboy. Pirate or cowboy. Choose.”</p><p>“You are a cruel and unjust mistress.”</p><p>“And you are out to put me into an early grave, John Hancock. I swear you’re suicidal.”</p><p>“Jus’ got a <em> joie de vivre, </em>sweet thing. Only got one life, so-” He starts.</p><p>“- why not do it all?” She finishes, still frowning.</p><p>He grins smugly. “You <em> are </em> learning.”</p><p>She sighs, “You are such a pain in the ass sometimes.”</p><p>His grin only gets wider, “And yet it’s me you drag across the Commonwealth. <em> Very </em> interesting,” He says, drawing out the <em> very </em> as if he were Valentine considering a clue in a case.</p><p>She doesn’t justify his quip with an answer for a lingering moment, and he’s about to tease her about a ghoul catching her tongue when she says, very quietly, “You could’ve been killed, Hancock.”</p><p>Her anger, her exasperation, the playful banter - all of it is gone, fizzling out into worry and sincerity and <em> pain </em>that brings him short. His grin slips, the open honesty in her voice and expression having caught him off guard. Warmth blooms in his chest, a heavy weight but also light as air as her eyes raise to him. He realizes that she’s moved her hand into his again, the gentle slide of her skin up his wrist such a jarring contrast to the texture of his own that it makes him shiver. Her skin is soft, silken, and warm, and her fingers grip around his wrist with a tenderness that makes him ache.</p><p>“Funny thing about having something to lose: you start to do dumb shit to avoid having to lose it.” He says, trying to keep his tone lighter than this feels.</p><p>“I’m being serious.”</p><p>“So am I,” He murmurs, turning his hand over and gripping her wrist in return.</p><p>Her hand squeezes his wrist, her lips pursing and relaxing over and over, and he can see that there’s so much she wants to say, but it just can’t seem to get through the walls she has set around herself. </p><p>“I’d do it again,” He adds.</p><p>Her voice is a small whisper when she speaks, “I know. I just wish you wouldn’t.” </p><p>“You don’t think you’re worth it?” He asks, and the thought that she doesn’t even see how unbelievably importantly she is to him is a sobering one.<br/><br/>She shakes her head, “No, nothing like that. It's... You… You’re irreplacable and precious. You have people in Goodneighbor that are waiting with bated breath to welcome you home once you’re done your… sabbatical with me.” Her word choice makes him chuckle, and although it’s weak, she smiles, “I’m sure they’d be heartbroken if you died out here with me. I - <em>I </em>would be devastated if you died trying to protect me. Not that Fahrenheit would let me live very long afterwards.”</p><p>He’s already shaking his head before she’s finished, and he doesn’t raise his voice, but there’s an edge that exists there now, “Those rules apply to you, too. You've got people that'd miss you something awful, sunshine. Y’know that right? You think Valentine and Piper wouldn't join forces to gut me if I dropped the ball and let you die? What about that fuckin’ Minuteman who’s name I can never remember?” She snorts, and he squeezes their linked hands, “And if I die, so what? That’s just the way it is. The wasteland is an unforgiving beast that’ll fuck you up on a good day, but I signed on knowing that. Everyone in Goodneighbor knows how bad it is out here. But they also know me, and they know I would rather lay down my life than live knowing that there was something I could have done to protect somebody else. Especially you. I’d do the dumbest fucking thing every time if it meant you would get out alive. Even if the thing to save you is jumping on a deathclaw’s back like the sexiest zombie cowboy you’ve ever fucking seen.”</p><p>The end makes her laugh, the smallest break in her voice. Using their linked hands, she tugs him forward, looping her free arm around him, their hands between them. Her hug is tight despite the way it makes her breath catch, her grip only tightening when he tries to give her space. She whispers in his ear, “Thank you. It was stupid and idiotically fearless, but thank you for trying to protect me.”</p><p>His arm comes around her good side tenderly, resisting the all consuming urge to crush her to his chest as he tucks his head into her neck. He closes his eyes and breathes in her scent, a warm and comforting smell that reminds him of better times somehow,  “Anytime, doll.” </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>this chapter is brought to u by the challenge: how many times can i say deathclaw in a single chapter</p><p>thank you for reading and i hope you enjoyed!!</p><p>p.s. for anyone curious, the appearance of my sole survivor is modelled after <a href="https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/american-actress-ava-gardner-news-photo-1608139271.?crop=1.00xw:0.705xh;0,0.0474xh&amp;resize=640:*">ava gardner</a>, with black hair and almost black eyes.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter III</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It feels uncanny to be needed by her. </p><p>Even in Goodneighbor, where he’s known for occasionally taking sudden leaves to bring the fight to oppressors, one would wonder how the fuck it didn’t burn to the ground without him watching over everything (the answer is Fahrenheit, but that’s neither here nor there). When he’s there, everyone looks to him for guidance at every second, for help, for favour. He’s <em> needed</em>, and when he’s in Goodneighbor, he’s needed <em> constantly, </em> enough so that he sometimes just puts Fahrenheit’s scowl in front of the door to his office when wants to get some goddamn peace and quiet. </p><p>But not Nora. He might never be sure of what exactly compelled him to offer his company to her in the first place and what compels him to keep offering, but what he <em> does </em>know is that the moment he met her, he knew he would like her: she had guts, she wasn’t afraid to get her own hands dirty doing the right thing, but the most captivating thing about her had been the fact that she didn’t ever seem to need him. It was as simple as giving her a job and she’d do it. She didn’t ask him to hire out a gun to help her, didn’t shake him down for caps;she just asked the questions to fill in any gaps and headed out. </p><p>Even at her most injured, Nora grit her teeth through it as well as she could and dealt with the damage by herself. Only once has Hancock had to intervene to save her ass, early on in their partnership, and it had him sprinting through the Boston ruins with a bundle of Nora held in his arms, Super Mutants hot on their heels, and though blood spilled from her body in rivers and she had to hold her own abdomen closed with her hands, she had stayed awake (although admittedly delirious) and said nothing of her pain through it all. She had just set her jaw and refused to let the pain show through a carefully crafted exterior. And even with that instance in mind, Nora is a damn survivor, and he knows in his gut that she would have managed to live through that catastrophe even without him there. </p><p>After all this time travelling close and almost always being the gun protecting her back, she still doesn’t need him - if there was anyone in the Commonwealth Wasteland that had a chance of surviving it completely alone, Hancock would bet every cap he had ever made on Nora: she’s fierce, wickedly smart, and just this side of crazy that she can stare down a deathclaw and still load her weapons with steady hands. She doesn’t need him, never has, but that’s the thing that his mind catches on to in this moment - it’s thrilling in an impossibly complicated way that it makes his head spin and his heart hurt that, by the looks of things, she drags him around the Commonwealth just to have the benefit of his companionship. </p><p>Kendall Hospital has been different. It’s made everything different. He’s always liked her, always found her beautiful, but those were afterthoughts to him - she’d rapidly become one of his closest friends and someone he trusted. He trusts her to watch him through the scope as he charges head first into a fight, trusts her ability to see the vulnerable, broken pieces he tries to hide without making him regret it, but she’d always say the thing he needed to hear, or she’d let her support be an unspoken hand on him when words simply weren’t enough. That kind of trust is a priceless thing in this world, and not something he took for granted. Despite his charisma and reputation of being fairly well liked, he trusted few and kept his circle of confidantes small for a reason, and yet she seemed to charge through all of his reservations like they’d never existed at all - and fuck, for <em> her</em>, maybe they hadn’t.</p><p> He rarely let anyone other than Fahrenheit watch over him in the office of the Statehouse where he would often drug himself into complete oblivion, but when Nora was in town to pick him up for their next adventure, it felt… Different. He felt different. Jet has a way of making everything seem breathtaking - and that fact had admittedly led him to a few uncomfortable mornings-after - but jet made Nora <em> divine </em>. And when she’d sit there with her rifle across her lap, sipping from a glass of scotch that he kept in the office just for her, she would watch him ride his high over the rim of her glass with the oddest little smile and - and that look would make him think that the entire Institute nightmare factory could come through the door and she’d still be able to keep him safe. And then he’d let chems disconnect him from reality without fearing anything in the world, knowing that he had his own personal fucking Valkryie reclined on the couch across from him to look out for his dumb ass. </p><p>And he feels a shift, now, in the dusty chamber they share with a deathclaw corpse, and the shift moves in a direction he knows he can’t divert at a momentum he knows he can’t stop. Maybe something has changed for her, too. She’s definitely suffered worse and denied his help. This time, she let him see that she couldn’t get the first stimpak injected and let him do it. This time, she does still refuse another stimpak, using Hancock’s own refusal as her own in a way that frustrates him to the point of cursing but seems to delight her, but this time she <em> doesn’t </em>refuse his assistance in helping her out of the pit. He leaves her propped against rubble to climb up the ledge to the plank walkway that dropped her into the lower chamber in the first place, carefully moving them to the ground level to form a rocky ramp for her to be able to climb. She doesn’t protest when he helps her up, nor does she shrug him off when he ducks under the arm opposite to her broken ribs to act as a crutch and steady her as they shuffle up the walkway, and he feels an affectionate hand on his shoulder as he helps her lay down on one of the dirty mattresses.</p><p>His arm crosses over his chest to lay his hand over hers, squeezing lightly, “How you feeling, sunshine?”</p><p>She withdraws the pistol off her thigh and lays it down beside her head with a groan, “Do you want the real answer or are you just asking because you enjoy playing doctor?”</p><p>He snickers, “Can’t it be both?”</p><p>Her head falls back against the stack of flat pillows that do nothing to prop her up as she rolls her eyes. She shifts, trying to get more comfortable, her face paling rapidly until she slumps against the mattress, resigned to pain and discomfort as she closes her eyes. “Like a deathclaw used me as a punching bag to work out emotional issues.”</p><p>“Can I go next?” Hancock comments, and he stands up and steps back to avoid her weak swat.</p><p>One eye peeks open to stare at him, her scowl lacking any kind of true malice, before her eyelid falls closed again and she sighs, but there’s the smallest smile at the corner of her lip as she slips off her filthy gloves, “You wish. Deathclaw just barely got away with it. <em>You</em>, on the other hand... I could beat the tar out of with my bare hands any day. No missile launcher required.” </p><p>“That’s not fair: now I’ve got the image in my head of you trying to fist fight a deathclaw. I think people would pay some serious caps to see that.”</p><p>She wiggles a bit to remove her chest plate all the way, and he helps prop her up so she can slip off the armour piece without being asked, and when she’s laid back down, she moves on to the braces on her forearms, “Just you wait - next time we see a deathclaw, I’m gonna find out how much psycho it would take to kill it with a stick.”</p><p>“So long as you split the profits for the show, I’ll supply it,” He snickers, “They kept telling me I was a bad influence on you. Never believed the day was gonna come that I’d see the results. Speaking of chems, though…” He gently taps his knuckle against her bicep and asks, his tone serious, “I’m gonna take a look around for a stimpak, but I’m sure I can find some Med-X to take the edge off. I know chems aren’t your thing, but it could make you more comfortable.”</p><p>She doesn’t say anything for a too long moment, but he can tell that she heard him by the way her eyebrows furrow. There’s a hesitation written in the pained lines of her expression, and he can’t help his own grimace - for her to even consider the offer of chems is a testament to her pain. He’s rolling back on his heels about to tell her to forget it and that he’ll go looking for a stimpak, when she quietly says, “I avoid chems for a reason, Hancock. Both of my parents were addicts. I might be in pain, but it’s not enough to make me risk repeating that cycle.”</p><p>He stills. When he turns to her, her eyes are opened, dark, and piercing. There’s a heaviness to her words that hangs in the air and settles like a physical weight in his chest. He thinks back to her almost pious avoidance of chems, the way she’ll only indulge in a few drinks, her scarless body, the void of her past is made from - and he feels some of those pieces click into a partial of an image in his mind like a Nora shaped jigsaw. </p><p>He nods slowly, caught flat-footed by her admission. Most people use chems or drink to cope with the horror of the wasteland, and maybe that’s fucked up but it simply<em> is </em> , and Hancock doesn’t and won’t judge others for how they choose to cope with the kind of hardship that people go through day in and day out. But… Nora keeps his company well enough, and chem and alcohol use doesn’t seem to poke at any wounds when it’s not excessive, so it leaves an uncomfortable truth that when she says <em> addict, </em>she means people that truly used and abused their poison of choice until it buried them, literally or metaphorically.</p><p>Fuck. Now he knows why she knows how to take care of him so well in the comedown of his trips.</p><p>He always feels like he knows the right thing to say, but the words just won’t come to him, and he wishes he had another can of Mentats - ha! how fucking ironic is that thought? - to help him grab the words from the air. </p><p>The silence lingers too long, and Nora is the one to fill it, “I’m sorry, that was really heavy -”</p><p>“Don’t apologize for that,” He says instantly, so firmly that her mouth audibly snaps shut. He softens his tone immediately, and amends, “You’ve got nothing to apologize for. It’s not too heavy. I’m just trying not to say something stupid.”</p><p>And she <em> laughs</em>, then she swears in pain and <em> he </em> laughs at her disgruntled expression, and it’s enough to relax him enough that he feels that he can think of the - well, not the <em> best </em> words, but close enough that he’s not going to make a fool of himself, “I mean, makes a lot of sense that you avoid ‘em like they’re radioactive. I wish that it was the case that you were the type to try and be respectable and dignified all the time-” She snorts at that, and he smirks, feeling the knot in his chest unwind, “- but this seems more real.”</p><p>“It’s not an easy thing to bring up with people these days.”</p><p>“Especially not with someone that huffs jet the way I do,” He says, so she doesn’t have to. He’s quiet a second, then he sits back down beside her mattress, “Look, before I say fuckin’ anything, just know that you never gotta do <em> anything </em> that you don’t want to do. Never. But the opposite is true - you should do the things you wanna do, when you wanna do them, so long as you’re not being a fuckin’ tyrant about it. But listen; I’ve broken bones before, including my ribs, and I know how much a break like this fuckin’ kills. I’m gonna try to scavenge another stimpak to help speed it along, but even if I find one… Well, remember how long it took the stimpak to fix your ankle after that feral broke it?”</p><p>Nora’s mouth twists to be reminded of the moment when a ghoul that looked well and dead grabbed her ankle and tried to yank her through the gaps in a staircase, snapping her ankle in the process. Hancock moves on, “That was just your ankle - that deathclaw probably broke most of the ribs under those claw marks. With a second dose, we’re still gonna be laid up here for an hour or two. The questionable safety of this spot aside, do you think you can grin and bear the pain that long? And before you say something clever, do you really <em> want </em> to deal with pain that long?”</p><p>She doesn’t say anything, her lips pursed as she averts her gaze from him. He leans to the side to catch her eye, and when her gaze turns back to him, he continues with a sigh, “All that being said: if you think Med-X could give you trouble, or I see it becoming a problem later on, I’ll help keep you clean - I know, I know it’s a cold day in Hell, you don’t have to say it -” He adds, hands raised at her doubtful but amused expression, “<em>I</em> think it’s healthy to cut loose and I don’t see a problem with using chems to do that, but you’re not me, and this isn’t about me. I don’t want you doing something for yourself that you’ll end up regretting in the long run. Especially when it’s something I encouraged you to do.”</p><p>Her expression is unreadable but intense, and she says nothing, nothing, and Hancock starts to feel like he’s seriously overstepped - Goodneighbor is more concerned about getting enough chems for its inhabitants than it is concerned about addiction, and this is… It’s fucking important and he feels uncomfortably out of his element. Maybe it’s lingering jitters from the jet, but he can’t stop tapping his hand nervously against his thigh as something he can’t decipher happens behind her eyes, until he breaks her contemplative silence himself, “Ya gotta give me something, sunshine. What’s going on in your head?”</p><p>She extends her fingers gingerly to still his restless hand, and he takes it without thought. “If you’re gonna help me out like that, then I’ll take the Med-X,” But her lips are still parted, and there’s still more that she wants to say written in the softness of her expression. He wants to know, wants to get another peek behind that impenetrable curtain she wraps her vulnerabilities in, and then she murmurs softly, her voice gentle but filled with feeling, “It’s - ah, it’s just good to be reminded that I’ve got someone honestly good at my back.”</p><p>He should say something clever and teasing, but instead he stops breathing, and hopes she doesn’t hear the catch in his breath. He doesn’t think he’s ever been good in his entire fucking life. His mother called him rotten when she discovered the extent of his chem use, his own brother thought he was scum, and while he was proud of Goodneighbor and it’s achievements, he’d done a lot of fuckin’ bad to get it there. And Nora knew all of this, and yet she thought <em> he </em> was good. </p><p>His eyes drift to their joined hands as her thumb begins to rub a lazy, affectionate circle against the back of his hand, probably unconsciously - it has to be unconscious, it just <em> has </em> to be, the touch is too tender and too gentle and the feel of her bare skin against his ruined flesh is so good, and it makes him <em> ache </em>. The digit is lightly calloused at the base from gripping her rifle or pistol too tight, but soft - <em> so soft - </em>everywhere else, and her grip shifts from grasping his hand to run the entire softness of her palm over the back of his hand. The touch is like silk over the roughness of his irradiated flesh, and as her fingers move over some of the more sensitive, sunken scars near his wrist, it feels like a snap of lightning. </p><p>He sucks a breath in through his teeth, and Nora’s hand pauses, and when finds it in him to look into her eyes, she is looking at him with a level of softness he didn’t know that she was capable of.</p><p>“Am I making you uncomfortable?” She murmurs in question, and he is so focused on the way her eyelashes cast spidery shadows on her cheekbones that he almost doesn’t hear the question.</p><p>“Never,” He breathes, before her hand can slip away from his, and he’d feel a tad abashed at the roughness of his voice if her lips didn’t curve into a smile over the reply. </p><p>Her hand resumes it’s path, and - he’s breathing again, he realizes, and he also realizes that his heartbeat is thundering in his ears, pounding so hard in his chest that he thinks that it might break <em> his </em> ribs, and he can’t look away from her bare hand over his, too afraid that if he looks up into her eyes again that it will break the spell and she’ll remember that it’s <em> him </em>. As if he could look away, anyway - he is captivated by the sight of the smooth, unscarred, paleness of her skin over his burns, the ugliness of his choices written across every part of him, inside and out, and yet her touch is so featherlight, like <em> he </em> is something precious and delicate and - and Nora is <em> touching him </em> - not just making physical contact with him, but almost caressing him over his wrist. Her fingers dip just so under the edge of his coat’s sleeve against a knotted scar and the touch is innocent and soft but holy <em> fuck, </em>if he isn’t aware of every nerve in his body right now.</p><p>She’s good. The bar was set on the fucking ground, but she’d never treated him different, looked at him different, touched him different, and even as those smooth-skinned fingers run across an old, scarred-over lesion, she doesn’t seem to mind. She keeps him close and trusts him at her back and trusts him to keep her safe when she sleeps. She trusts him, and had said so in as many words. He doesn’t know that he’s done a fucking thing to ever deserve that, and yet she gives it to him anyway.</p><p>Her fingers stretch out over his wrist under his jacket, and he becomes hyperaware of the sight and feeling of her pale fingers disappearing under the frayed red sleeve of his coat. He - he dares to wonder, in a dizzy and distant sort of way, what it might feel like for those hands to caress his face, his throat, or - if he’s lost in a moment of wishful thinking - he wonders about feeling the softness of her skin under his <em>own</em> hands, his fingers caressing <em>her</em> face, <em>her</em> throat, anything she’s willing to offer, he’d take, and he’d take without hesitation. Her fingers gently wrap around his wrist, fingernails gently scratching the underside of his forearm, and an euphoric shiver like jet races up his spine. </p><p>The shiver brings an awareness of his own body and surroundings that he’d previously ignored  - the room is fucking <em> sweltering</em>, or maybe it’s just him that feels hot, and - and he was going to do something, before she touched him, he - the Med-X! Right - because Nora is laying there with <em> broken </em> ribs and he’s just sitting there like an asshole while he preens under her touch as if he were a damned cat. </p><p>He clears his throat of it’s rawness, and lamely says, “I should get that Med-X for you,” And then he moves to stand, trying to not look rushed as he does so, because <em> shit </em> he’ll become religious just in hopes that God would answer Hancock’s prayer that she would maybe someday touch him again like this, with this much affection. He looks down a moment - a fucking <em> mistake</em>, because he swears that he sees… is that <em> disappointment </em> in her eyes? He must officially be losing his fucking mind. Jet must be making him hallucinate, there’s just no fucking way. </p><p>Her hand - smooth and soft and warm and <em> fucking stop it, Hancock </em>- comes to rest against her own sternum, “Okay. Be careful.”</p><p>“Always am,” He mumbles, definitely turning too quickly to step into an adjacent hallway. When he’s out of sight and out of ear shot, he leans his back against the wall, holding his hand - <em> the hand </em> - against his chest, the memory of her skin burning him, and he tries to breathe in through his nose and out through his mouth because if he gets turned on by a hand touch, then he has to admit that he maybe being her friend isn’t enough, and that maybe he might have feelings for -</p><p>“Absolutely fucking not,” He whispers out loud, hand clenched tightly into a fist as he glares at the ceiling. “Don’t fucking do this, John.”</p><p>In the time it takes for him to occupy his thoughts with something else - trying to list off the eight thousand fucking settlements Preston Garvey - <em> that was the motherfucker’s name! - </em> wants them to check on with time they don’t fucking have, Daisy beating him to death with a book because he’s thinking about how soft Nora might be - nope, aborted, next thought - and he does this until he’s able to get a handle on his uncontrollably racing heart. Over and over again like the rambling mantras of a madman until he can pretend that he forgets the feel of her skin.</p><p>It takes longer for him to pull himself together than it does for him to find the Med-X, another stimpak, <em> and </em>an over-the-shoulder first aid kit with everything she’d need to keep the injection sanitary.  As he moves through and grabs what he needs, he notes that they should both give the whole hospital a good sweep since, hey, now that they’re not getting shot at by raiders or getting thrown around by a deathclaw, it finally occurs to him that the raiders might not have picked this place clean after all, and all the medical supplies they could ever need for both of their respective towns might be right here. </p><p>Although he takes a second to be sure he’s calm and won’t make a fucking fool of himself, he doesn’t delay returning to her. Before he turns the corner to where she’s laid out, he makes sure to announce himself clearly, “It’s just me.” </p><p>He peers around the corner and is rewarded with the sight of her looking at him upside down, pistol held aloft in only one arm - likely got it out when she heard him coming. The sight of her flopped back, clearly bedridden but still managing to hold him at gunpoint, while no less intimidating, makes him snicker. He’s got a syringe in each hand, holding them high in mock surrender as he dryly quips, “Don’t you know? It’s bad practice to shoot the doctor, or something.”</p><p>“Or something,” She echoes just as dryly, clicking the safety on as she lays the pistol down at her side, “I’m pretty sure the Geneva Conventions would allow it if they knew how much trouble the doctor likes to stir up. I’m pretty sure they don’t like to let hooligans serve as medical professionals.”</p><p>“I prefer the term ‘scoundrel’. ‘Roguish’ works, too, so long as you tack ‘handsome’ to that.”</p><p>“And <em> there’s </em> my point proven,” She deadpans with a roll of eyes. Her gaze shifts to eye the Med-X warily, as if it might bite, “Does that work the same as a stimpak?”</p><p>“Intravenous instead of intramuscular,” He answers, returning to sit at her side and pulling the first aid kit open between them.</p><p>“That should be straight forward…” She says, mostly like she’s trying to convince herself of that.</p><p>She winces something fierce as she moves to sit up, and his hands automatically lift to help. Just before he places a hand on her back to help her up, he hesitates. Him running off like a jackass could’ve… Oh, who fucking knows. Maybe it was a one off of curiosity at the texture of a ghoul’s skin, and maybe she’d shrug him off or slap his hand away if he actually touched her. It isn’t until one of her hands hovers in the air towards him that he gets a fucking grip, and he lets his arm act as a brace for her to lean against. When she’s up straight, her face is white with pain, and when she begins to work on rolling up her sleeve, the movement is slow and sluggish.</p><p>He hands her the syringe without question when she holds her hand out for it, and she positions the needle against her elbow, just below a faint blue line of a vein. Her hands are trembling. His brow furrows, and he leans forward, “Sister, if it’s stressing you out, you don’t-”</p><p>“I’m not stressed about it,” She almost snaps, speaking through clenched teeth as the muscles in her jaw jump, “I- My ribs just fucking hurt, and my hands just won’t stop fucking shaking about it.” She makes a sigh that’s almost a groan, and shoves the syringe into his hand. “You do it. I’m gonna take my eye out at this rate.”</p><p>He takes it, holding the small syringe between his pinky and ring finger as he digs out a latex strip from the first aid kit. He wraps the strip tight across her bicep until the veins in her forearm bulge, and then he pulls out an alcohol swab from the kit. He tears the packet open with his teeth, rubbing the swab in a much larger area than is necessary at the inside of her elbow. When he looks up, she’s got an eyebrow raised, and answers the question in her eyes, “Chem use 101: if you’re injecting something from a source you don’t know or trust, it’s good practice to take precautions when you can.”</p><p>“I have never <em> once </em> seen you sterilize before shooting <em> anything</em>, Hancock.”</p><p>“Well, I got my own hookups that I trust. I know they’re not gonna sell me anything that’s cut with random shit, and they know better than to give me somethin’ dirty. I have no idea where this thing has been. So, extra precautions and all that,” He shrugs, then switches his grip as he lines up the needle, bevel point facing down with his thumb ready against the plunger, “You ready?”</p><p>She nods, watching him carefully. He takes her wrist to hold her still, trying to tuck away the way his heart jumps when her hand grips him in return. There’s the smallest hitch of her breath as the needle breaks skin, and then it melts into a dreamy sigh as Hancock makes quick work of it. The injection is smooth, practiced, and hey, maybe he’s a little ashamed of it, but at least he can say that decades of drug abuse is finally helpful in some kind of way. </p><p>Nora is slumping even before Hancock wipes the swab against the bloody dot that is welling up at her elbow, and he even sticks an adhesive bandage over the injection site for good measure. She’s making an odd sort of humming noise, deep in her chest, which makes Hancock chuckle. She watches him with a lazy passiveness that’s odd coming from her, and he prepares the second stimpak, “I’m gonna inject this one up by your sternum so we don’t gotta jostle you all over again. You good if I unbutton your collar a little lower?”</p><p>She hums without words in a way that is vaguely affirmative, but he pushes the point, “I need a yes or no for that, sister.”</p><p>“Yessssssir.”</p><p>He makes quick work of two of the buttons holding her the top of her shirt closed, pressing his fingers firmly against the top of her chest to find a space between two ribs. He - he will <em>not</em> to look at her, not when she’s high like this, but even the few glances he accidentally gets are seared into his memory; the curve of her neck, the swoop of her collarbone, the smallest view of her cleavage - </p><p>He quickly injects the medications between the intercostal muscles, tosses the stimpak with more force than it deserves into the first aid bag. She watches his hands repack the kit with dark, half-lidded eyes. Her pupils are unfocused and blown wide when he takes a good look at her: she’s a proper space cadet if he’s ever seen one. He grins, his tone gentle as he checks-in, “How you feelin’, Sunshine?”</p><p>“Mmmmmmm,” The sound is a long, single note drone, but it’s just this side of pleasure that it’s a good enough answer for him, “You… You w’re right. ‘m much better.”</p><p>“Good.”</p><p>She stretches like a contented cat, and he holds a hand on her shoulder to halt the movement, “Hey, hey, hey, easy - I know you don’t feel it anymore, but you’re still hurt. Take it easy.”</p><p>“Bossy,” She mumbles, and he laughs.</p><p>“That’s what you get when you leave me in charge. You should rest.”</p><p>“W… Gotta go.” She says sleepily, her eyelids fluttering.</p><p>“You’re definitely gonna need to work off some of the high before we’re good to go out again.”</p><p>She frowns, eyes closed, “‘S not fair. Yer high all the time.”</p><p>“Well, I got years of practice, sweets. Can’t say the same for you.”</p><p>She makes a discontented noise. When she doesn’t speak again, he thinks she’s fallen asleep, her breathing even and soft. He almost startles when she speaks up in a soft mumble, “Y’should drag that mattress over and lay down w’me. Y’oughta be tired, too.”</p><p>He blinks, eyeing the mattress in question. It wasn't coincidence that she always sought out sites with a single entrance or exit where the one taking first watch could stand post just outside. They never slept in the same room - something Nora insisted on without saying so in as many words. He doesn't even think he's ever seen her asleep, since she'd just snap awake if he so much as touched the door when it was her turn to take watch. And now, she's asking him to... He swallows, looking back at her, “I shouldn't, y'know... You're high, and I should keep watch-”</p><p>“F-Fuck that,” She slurs, “If there was anyone left, they’d ‘a killed us. C’mon.”</p><p>And so he does. Because while he could correct her logic, remind her again that she's high, remind her that she hates people sharing her space when she sleeps, she says it with so much conviction that it brokers no argument, so he gets up and drags the mattress over to her side. He lays down, feeling stiff while trying to give her distance in the sparse space between their two mattresses. This could be fine. No boundary had ever officially been requested, and she had asked him, so he wasn't crossing a line. Right? This is fine. He just has to keep himself relaxed and calm.</p><p>Nora evidentially has no intention of allowing his racing heart any rest; her hand reaches out and takes his, again, and she lets out a slow, lazy laugh as she tucks it under her chin, the back of his hand being cradled against the far side of her throat. He feels her slow, relaxed pulse under the backs of his fingers, a grounding weight that stops him from forgetting that this is real, not a dream. This feels too close, too much, especially when she’s high and not herself. He shouldn't indulge this, and he tries to think of a way to pull his hand back, gently refuse her on the basis that she’s fucked on Med-X... And the words are there, at the front of his mind, on the tip of his tongue, but he just can’t bring himself to say them, not when she hums so warmly. </p><p>Her fingers cover his hand, guiding his hand to cradle the shape of her jaw, and the urge to stay still is a physical pain in his body. He can’t act now. He can’t - she sighs, softly, fondly, and it feels blissfully painful in his chest, “Y’know, ‘ve always liked the feel of your skin.”</p><p>His voice is choked, and all he can manage is a weak, “Yeah?” </p><p>She leans into the touch of his hand, and her flushed cheek scalds his fingertips, “Mhm.”</p><p>He laughs, almost in disbelief, and his voice is barely a rasp when he finds the words, “I think you’d be the first person to think so.”</p><p>Fuck, it’s so self-deprecating, but how can he not be? Calling him disfigured would be generous - walking talking freakshow would be much more accurate. It wasn’t just self-hatred, it’s just a truth. But she’s holding him with an intimacy like that fact simply… wasn’t. He wasn’t in short supply of hook-ups in Goodneighbor, so he would’ve never thought of himself as touch-starved, but… he can’t think of any time, before or after his ghoulification, that someone touched him with this much endearment. Nor could he think of anyone that knows every ugly piece of him the way Nora did, and still treats him like he fucking <em> mattered</em>. </p><p>"People 're fuckin' lame," She murmurs against his palm, her lips brushing softly near his thumb as she nuzzles her hot cheek against his hand. He huffs a nervous laugh, and he has to look at the ceiling to even his breathing as she mumbles, “‘s textured n’ feels nice.”</p><p>“I aim to please,” He manages weakly. </p><p>She hums, and says nothing more than that. Her breathing evens out into a slow, restful rhythm, and when he looks over, her head is lolled into his hand, still cradling it against her, even in sleep. </p><p>God, is he fucked.</p><p>He’s <em> so fucked.  </em></p><p>And he shouldn’t hope - can’t hope - that she’d ever even entertain the thought, not even in passing, but he does. And when he finds his own sleep, soothed by the rise and fall of her breath, the worst of the dreams that hound his sleep are chased away by the warmth of her skin against his fingertips.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>a chapter a week, for three chapters in a row??? its more likely than u think. </p><p>thanks for reading! i dont think ive written anything on any platform that got this much love, so i thank everybody thats left kudos, comments, bookmarks, or took the time to read this! i appreciate it a lot!!!!! the support means the world to me. &lt;3</p>
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